We just ended a 5 weeks teachers’ training course about educational innovation, with 44 teachers of 20 schools around the area of Cuenca – Ecuador. The course touched on a variety of different topics which included: work on the importance of the aesthetic dimension in teaching, innovative methodologies of teaching in the Ecuadorian context such as ‘provocazioni’ (provocations), working logical, mathematical thinking through ‘provocazioni’, fostering creative thinking through play and pedagogical innovation. The course took place twice a week, three-hour sessions, for a total of ten sessions!
Overall the course received extremely positive feedback!
The blue box is a present we received as a result of the course!
Here a few pictures and examples about the kinds of ‘provocazioni’ we offered to the teachers and a few moments…more to come on the blog in the future!
Preparing ‘provocazioni’ for the teachers in the course with Sergio, Joana, Alejandra, Manena etc., and one of my UNAE students. It takes us hours to prepare the room. Every little detail is carefully thought through:
A ‘provocazione’ for fine motor-skills and writing in young children:
Here is one of the provocazioni (provocations) in the day where we talked about developing ludic and creative thinking through education. It was a table that was thought for children of secondary school. Of course, the teachers we were training also loved playing at this table:
Every day that we prepared the classroom we divided it in different spaces, each space had a fixed theme. The provocazione would change every day, but the space would always keep the same underlying theme. Below is a student-teacher working in the artistic space, where we always offered a new material to work with. This day way ‘papel moche’:
Another key environment was that which developed spacial intelligence and which mainly focused on building and creating. Here we projected on the wall a Kandinsky painting, we attached a white paper on it, and attached some recycled material to reproduce on the piece of paper in 3D some of the shaped of the painting. The provocazione was to place only a few pieces on the paper, and then let the teacher create more with material that we made available for them:
Another example of a provocation that had great success was the ‘box with earth’. We organised it very elegantly for the arrival of the teachers, and borrowed some toys from Nicolas – a child that is always around UNAE…
We would always give time to teachers when the arrived to explore, engage and play with the provocazioni. Here is a product of one of these games by some of the teachers:
Then Nicolas intervened and decided to play with us too, and bring more of his toys to the table:
Pensieri di Bea 